but what is the data folder there for? I also have a bunch of .data and .iphoto icons scattered throughout, do I need those?
It's hard to let it go when I discovered that iPhoto creates duplicates of files.
Here's a basic explanation of what iPhoto is doing - bear in mind that its main purpose is to help those with no concept of files/structure/editing be able to use their photos more easily.
If you leave it on the default settings, yes, it will make a copy of your image to put in its Library (in the Originals folders). If you're importing direct from a memory card, this is a good thing. If you're importing in from an existing file structure, it means you lose HD space. There are two options here - either change to use iPhoto's option that uses your file structure or just archive off those folders to another drive/DVDs and delete them from your HD. I did the latter - since it meant I still have backups but don't take up disk space.
If you modify a picture, then iPhoto leaves the original in place but now displays your modified picture in the 'Modified' folders. The good news is that you can go back to it at any point. The bad news is that if you edit most of your pictures, you do take up more HD space. I'd love for their to be an option that deletes the original picture after a period of time or that you could flag to do so. But as it stands, there's not.
The Data file holds thumbnails of all your pictures. Part of the import process creates thumbnails of the pictures. These are a reasonable size and means that when you use the size slider in the photo library, it can display the image without doing lots of processing to resize the full image on the fly. It's not until you go into the edit screen that you're really using the full-size image. These aren't all that big - 30-40K per picture - so while it's taking up space, unless you have a tiny HD, it's not all that big.
The other files - the .data, .iphoto and albums.xml - keep track of what you're doing with the pictures - what pictures are in which albums, what ratings/keywords/comments you've assigned as well as some of the additional information like Makernote from your camera. They take up virtually no space on your HD - my biggest one is the Library.iphoto one at 13MB on several thousand pictures. You definitely need all of these and you need to leave the files where they are - don't tidy them all into a subfolder. As others have said, you don't need to work on your pictures through the Finder so you should never have to see them.
ero87 said:
I don't see why iPhoto can't organize its folders intuitively so that we could view them in the app AND in the finder. shouldn't be too hard...
To be fair, I do think that went away after iPhoto 6. It was semi-logical before (year, month, date) but it is very easy to find things in the Finder now given that the folders are named the same thing as they are in iPhoto. The problem is that if you start working on pictures outside iPhoto, then the entire way in which that's built (using the data files etc) falls apart since it has no reference for what you've changed/added/deleted and will look for things which are no longer there.
Bear in mind that when you delete things in iPhoto, they don't go to the normal trash. Instead they sit in iPhoto's trash and you have to empty it separately.
downingp said:
Another question I have is when I import new pictures from my camera it puts the pictures in a new "roll number" folder unless I name it specifically. What if I want to combine it with another folder later?
This is the easy one. If you want to combine a roll (say your pics from an event and a pal's pics that they send you later) then all you have to do in iPhoto (assuming you work with the film roll option turned on) is highlight the pictures in one roll and drag them into the other. Behind the scenes in the Finder, iPhoto will have moved them into the other folder for you. Similarly, if you import some pictures and they are of different events, then you can create and name a "film roll" and drag some into the new roll.
